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Subject: [WHITNEY-L] Re: WHITNEY-D Digest V03 #33
Date: Tue, 18 Feb 2003 18:54:43 EST

Nancy the next message I read was this one from My Whitney Research Group;
This man has certainly followed the Rules for Staying Young. (My paternal
Grandmother was a Whitney) I hope when I am 100 I am able to crawl out a
window (not from the
14th floor though) Barbara

100-Year-Old Discovers Home on His Own
Man left daughter in Oregon for North Dakota

MOTT, N.D. (AP) --- This town harbors a runaway.
He's holed up in a small apartment, reading books and doing
crossword puzzles. And at age 100, Paul Whitney is glad to be home.
Whitney ran away to Mott from Grants Pass, Ore., where he had
been living with his 73-year-old daughter. He felt she coddled him too
much, and he figured they would drive each other crazy.
It reached a point last April where he couldn't take it one more
day. He stuffed clothes and his heart medicine into a pillowcase and, with
his aching knees, crawled out of the window.
He had only one place to run to --- the southwestern North
Dakota town of about 800, where he had lived as a boy until 1919, and where
his mother died of pneumonia in 1908.
Whitney said that after getting out the window, he made it to
the Grants Pass bus station, where officials had been warned not to sell a
ticket to an old man wanting to go to Dickinson, N.D.
A police officer arrived. Whitney said the two talked, and the
officer told him, "There ain't nothing wrong with you. Go get your ticket."
So Whitney bought his bus ticket and climbed on board to watch
the miles roll by. He hired a taxi to drive him the final 60 miles from
Dickinson to Mott, and had a bit of a shock along the way.
He told the taxi driver he planned to take a room at the Holiday
House, where he had stayed in years past.
"Been burned down since 1989," was the reply.
With the driver's help, Whitney found a service agency in Mott
that helped him get into a small apartment.
There he has enough to live on --- a few pots and kettles on the
stove, a pile of rummage sale books next to his reading table.
> A few weeks back, some men in town came to see how he was
getting on. They checked out his apartment, left and returned with a
recliner, table and chairs, a chest of drawers and pictures for his walls.
"We figured a 100-year-old guy shouldn't have an empty old
apartment," said Lanny Johnson, one of the four.
Whitney, who also lived earlier in Arkansas, has memories and
stories, like the one about the time he took a bullet through the chest, and
the way Mott used to look back in its earliest days. The town will
celebrate its centennial this year.
Doris Schatz delivers meals to Whitney and picks him up Sunday
mornings to take him to church.
"He does a wonderful job," she said, "He takes life as it
comes."
She figures he needs people to talk to, though Whitney says he's
perfectly satisfied.
"When you stop chasing women, you don't get lonely," he said.
There are places around Mott he'd like to see --- a pond, the
old homestead. He has been up to the cemetery to visit his mother. His
plot is there beside her, as it has been all along.
He figures some might say his decision to run away to Mott was a
foolish idea. But life is what you make it, he says. And he made it home.
:"I'm satisfied here," he said.

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